Magne interviewed on The Briefing

Monocle.com’s radio talkshow The Briefing is doing a special Nordic edition this week. Yesterday the show was broadcast live from Oslo, and Magne was one of the guests.

The interview with Magne was done in London however, as he was there to do some work. The conversation with Tom Edwards touched on Norwegian cultural politics, Magne’s visual arts and the music he’s doing for the upcoming Beatles movie:

“Musically, right now I’m deep into a film score for a film called ‘Beatles’. I think it’s gonna be called ‘Yesterday’ over here. It’s actually the first time that The Beatles have allowed original material to this degree. There’s three full Beatle recordings in the score, and I’m supposed to write original music that can stand up to that. That’s a bit of a challenge (laughs).

On the other hand, if I look at it differently this is a return to my own childhood. This is the music I grew up listening to, which inspired me to go out and make my mark on whatever world stage. It’s a little bit about returning to that feeling of growing up in a sort of a provincial place in the 1970s, where you had one hour of pop music on the radio every day. Kids today can’t even relate to that, but that’s what it was like.

I’ve sort of gone into a method around it that allows me to now go into Abbey Road – I’ve gotten hold of the “Lady Madonna” piano and the mics that they used and the recording equipment they used – and to set it up as a kind of authentic setting to recreate, not the music of The Beatles, but that zeitgeist, that time period.”